User:Vkrenkel/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Human trafficking in Virginia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
As we are taking a deeper dive into human trafficking and its role in the sex industry, I was interested to know what forms human trafficking commonly takes in my home state, Maryland. However, there is not a Wikipedia article for human trafficking in Maryland, so I chose the closest state I could, Virginia. This is a particularly noteworthy topic because residents of Virginia or the surrounding area, as well as government officials and prospective residents could gain great insight into the conditions of Virginia. My first impression upon reading the article was that there was not much information to work with. Some of the sections seemed a bit out of place, like they should not have been in the article in the first place.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead contains a very clear definition that would allow a reader to understand what human trafficking in Virginia was at first glance. It does not, however, list the subtopics that were later discussed in the article; instead it just repeated the first sentence's identification of what human trafficking in Virginia is. The lead is a bit overdetailed, but contains no information that cannot be found elsewhere in the article.

For the most part, the article's content is relevant to the topic. However, I noticed a whole section dedicated to the history of slavery in Virginia that did not once mention human trafficking/sex trafficking. The lead mentioned that human trafficking is often referred to as modern slavery, so I suppose I could see the connection, but no comparisons were made between slavery and human trafficking. It seemed a bit out of place. The most recent citation on the article is from 2016, so it is fairly up to date, but because much of the information is from around 2010-2015, it would be great to see some more recent citations pulled in.

One aspect of this article I wanted to make note of was the mention that many refer to human trafficking as modern day slavery. This is actually a great debate in the fields of sex work and academia surrounding the sex industry, so it might be worthy to mention that in the article, or at least take it into account. This article does a great job of remaining balanced and unbiased, focusing solely on facts rather than tying in persuasive elements or arguments.

Almost all of the sources for this article are peer-reviewed publications. This being said, there were a few sources which were from less reputable news channels, one of which had been taken down and is no longer accessible. This is understandable, however, because of the nature of this topic and its subsequent lack of information. Often, trafficking incidents and cases of sex work without consent go widely underreported, especially because perpetrators often target minority groups or those who would be least likely or able to speak out. I'm not sure the writers would have been able to find a peer-reviewed source that told them who the first man to be convicted under Virginia's first anti-trafficking law was. I liked that the sources listed ranged widely from historical pieces to legal documents and legislation to relevant news stories.

I thought the article was well-written and easy to read. One of the most important aspects of Wikipedia articles is their digestibility, especially for the average reader (not an expert). I found this article to do a great job of walking readers through the limited information available. I noticed no grammatical or spelling errors, and was happy to see the clear sections and subtopics that the topic of trafficking in Virginia was broken into.

The article only features one image, and it is of a slave prison in Alexandria. As I previously mentioned, I do not understand why the history of slavery in Virginia is a topic for this article, and the prison is not mentioned even once in the article. I fail to see how this image relates to the topic. However, it is a sight for sore eyes in the otherwise plain text of the article, and is captioned accurately.

The talk page only features one comment from the internet archive bot. It is unrated, but part of WikiProject Virginia.